Why it’s crucial that the new superbug was in a urinary tract infection – “What they have found is that these resistant UTIs infections are not random and singular, but instead constitute a focused epidemic, caused by particular sets of E. coli that bear the same resistance signatures as ones found in meat animals given antibiotics. This idea has had difficulty gaining traction, because UTIs are usually dismissed as a minor problem, something that causes a few days of annoyance and requires a few days of antibiotics to fix. (And, not coincidentally, because they overwhelmingly happen to women.)”

“Universal cancer vaccine” breakthrough claimed by scientists – “Writing in Nature, an international team of researchers described how they had taken pieces of cancer’s genetic RNA code, put them into tiny nanoparticles of fat and then injected the mixture into the bloodstreams of three patients in the advanced stages of the disease. The patients’ immune systems responded by producing “killer” T-cells designed to attack cancer.” From Amy.

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Of all the areas where scientific ignorance (or at least apathy) pose a risk to humanity, antibiotic resistance is probably my single greatest fear.

And that’s in a world with anti-vaccine nutters potentially reintroducing deadly diseases, all of the numerous and sundry negative outcomes attached to climate change, and the thousands upon thousands put at risk every year by replacing medicine with alt medicine.

Bacteria are simply much better at defeating our immune systems than viruses, and the technology to stop them is one of the main things keeping 80 year lifespans possible.